Olyoke - by Vincent Endwell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Welcome to Olyoke, Tennessee: home to a Dollywood-style theme park, generations of troubled families, mysterious plagues, and the prophecies of a dead architect turned cult leader who has foretold a fiery cataclysm. As the time of the fire nears, inexplicable events compound: Darcy, a Dolly Parton impersonator, finds strange worms in the swamp and feeds them to her dog, who begins to speak with the voice of Darcy's dead mother; Recently divorced Lyle Knox is called through its dreams by a strange house, and soon discovers that Lyle Knox itself is not a person, but a structure; Maggie Warner organizes a theater production to stave off her gnawing misery and becomes convinced that only the people she sees in her dreams are real. Moreover, the Whistler-- the man Maggie becomes when she sleeps-- welcomes the town's impending Judgment with open arms. Many destinies will converge in Olyoke. None will escape unchanged.

Review Quotes

"An intriguing mosaic. OLYOKE comes steeped in the dark strangeness and wry dread of a classic Vertigo comic. Endwell blends the scope of weird histories with the scurrying of small human lives, caught like insects in time's ever-clinging trap."

• Hailey Piper, author, A Light Most Hateful

"Vincent Endwell's OLYOKE lures you into the crevice between Weird fiction and Appalachian horror, where something inscrutable yet warm has been gestating. You will come back different-burned in a great fire, perhaps serenaded by a Dolly Parton impersonator-but you never have to think of your old self again. If that isn't a resin-I mean reason, oh God, the book has infected me, too!-to recommend this unique melting pot of horrors, I don't know what is."

• Michael Wehunt, author, The October Film Haunt

"The kind of absurdist, glacial frogs-in-a-pot apocalypse that simultaneously feels entirely of this moment and completely off the rails. A bizarre mélange of deep-fried down-home southern gothic and mind-melting cosmic horror that will keep you flipping pages til the horrifying end."

• Bitter Karella, author, Moonflow

About the Author

Vincent Endwell is a writer, composer, and researcher originally hailing from unceded Onondaga territory (Central New York). Their work has been previously published in Campfire Publishing, Radon Journal, and Dark Horses Magazine, among others. Over the years, they have grown less certain that they would like to see a ghost.